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While I’m technically ready to start doing all of the adulting that I’ve got planned for the first couple of weeks of the new year, I am glad that today was essentially a “paused” day… where even if I wanted to, nothing significant could really be accomplished. 🤷🏻‍♂️🙂 I didn’t go out last night, nor did I have any company over, but I still didn’t fall asleep until around 3am. And of course I woke up too damn early, so my brain is thankful that the only real work that I’ll be doing today will be the stuff that I can address by mail. Which leaves all of the phone calls for tomorrow. 😳 Yay. 😟

Last night wasn’t totally lonely though. Brianna also stayed at home, although she was also babysitting for her sisters, so we ended up keeping each other company via messages up until the ball dropped at midnight and then a while after. ☺🎉 I think my adulting may be rubbing off on her, because a lot of what we talked about was both of our growing lists of “Shit We Gotta Do” in the next week or two. 😏 I mean, nobody is really a fan of responsibility, but I think it made her feel good (the same way it does me) to spend some of her evening coming up with a game plan of her own. 📒🖊👧🏻

I wish that I didn’t have to take Cassi back home earlier last night, but she did end up staying later than we originally planned. It was a rough, dark, rainy, stressfuldrive up to Columbus in that horrible weather – with 80% of the traffic still breaking the speed limit, and the other 20% either scared, creeping slowly, or completely stopped along side of the highway as they waited for the rain to stop. ☁🌧😯😣😧🙈⛈🌧 While she was here though, we started watching a new Korean rom/com/dram called Strong Girl Bong-soon. It’s strange how easily I take to Korean songs and shows now that I’ve been doing it for a bit. 😁🇰🇷

But yeah… this is kind of a rambling post since it’s been a leisurely kind of day for the most part. All of my upcoming doctor appointments are still heavy in my mind though… I’m just trying to not let them bother me today. 😟 I will say this though. I haven’t been feeling great for the past couple of weeks. 😐 Not awful, but not how I normally feel either. So while I’m not gonna try to predict anything when it comes to my upcoming tests, I think I’m subconsciously getting myself ready for some potentially bad news. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It doesn’t help that I’ve been having a lot of anxiety filled dreams lately as well. 😳 Not exactly nightmares, but dreams that definitely had a negative feel. And twice now I’ve had dreams where I died. 😕 One was strange… I had already passed away, but I was still around to console people and to help with all of the arrangements needed in that sort of circumstance. 😬 But the bad dreams, the specific “not feeling well” things… right now I am choosing to attribute it all to the Wellbutrin that one of my docs put me on. 🤒

I haven’t felt this mentally and physically shitty in a long while. 😔 And it’s so much so that I’m going to stop taking that new med until my next appointment with that doctor, so I can let him know the side effects that I’ve been experiencing. Over the years I’ve probably tried half-a-dozen different meds to help with depression or anxiety, and never have I made it past a month or two before the side effects outweighed the potential benefits – and I’m pretty sure this one will be the same way. 🤨 I’ve also got something more immediate for anxiety, but I haven’t noticed any bad side effects from that one, so perhaps I’ll be able to keep one-out-of-two in my rotation this time.

Alrighty then… time for some football. 🙂🏈 Ready to push the scary thoughts to the back again for now.

I’m not sure how I feel about the weekend falling right before New Year’s Eve. 😟 I think it’s actually going to work out better for me this way, since I’ve already got a January’s worth of medical appointments on my mind, but I can’t even really go about changing my insurance information or anything like that until after the first of the year when the new plan kicks in. 🤨 So I’ll have at least a couple of days to start planning who I need to contact and when, and I might even get a couple days after that since some places might be closed on Monday and/or Tuesday. I’ve just got a lot of upcoming shit… I wanna hit the ground running.

I think I’m gonna have Cassi down for the night tomorrow. She can’t stay on New Year’s Eve since she has to be at work early early, but it would still be nice for her to stay – since not only has it been a little while since she has, but also because it might also be a little while until the next chance – depending on how my month goes and how I’m feeling during any given stretch. 😔

I’ve also decided that I’m going to let her take my Wii and games back up home with her to give to Junior. I can’t remember the last time that I sat down and played any of my games, let alone any of the games on that system that’s almost a decade old now. I could sell it I guess, but I’d hardly get anything for the lot of it… might as well brighten up a kid’s day a bit, eh? 🙂 I’ll probably wait until she’s here to start finding all the bits and bagging it up… with the way I’ve moved stuff about since I last played, it’s hard to say what’s where.

But like I’ve described regarding my friends before… sometimes it’s just nice to have the company, because not only does it provide time to chill and (hopefully) clear the mind of “the now” for a while – something that’s always needed – but it also helps to encourage a little more productivity, since we’re both essentially able to pat each other on the back for our respective jobs well done. 😏

I’m certainly not looking forward to 2019, so a couple more days of “nothing” and some company to distract is probably exactly what I need. So I guess I do know how I’m feeling about it.

Got up early yesterday and went and got that steroid injection taken care of. Since I was having it done at a local “surgery pavilion” (yeah 🙄 I know) it ended up feeling like the real deal. 😯🏥 I had to strip and change into a gown in the staging type room, got all wired up with sensors and an IV, was rolled way down to a procedure room full of huge lab machines, and when I was done they wheeled me all the way back up to a different area (recovery) where, after having my vitals taken a couple more times, I got dressed again and then had some bloke guide me to the exit. 😳

The doctor that did the procedure is the same one that I’ve been seeing every month for the past decade, so after seeing him for years in “diagnostic mode” – it was kewl to see him in that environment, runnin’ the theater, calling out to either of the nurses for this and that, and then of course jabbing me with needles. 💉😬 And I’ll admit, some of the stuff hurt a little more than I expected. Kind of like when you get a tattoo on your bicep, the underneath part is super sensitive… well, in order to get me numbed up, the area(s) that he had to hit repeatedly with the lidocaine injections had that same “YOWZA!” effect.

So, the site was numb, and he went in… needle, then saline, then dye, then… oops, a bit of blood. 😯 I’m not sure exactly how bad that could be, but none of them seemed worried and he decided to try one level lower instead. (Which means I had to go through the anesthetic process all over again. ☹ Yay.) This time it went without issue… but let me tell you, it’s quite an unusual sensation having extra fluid (as limited as it probably was) pumped into your spine. It’s like it’s used to a certain “normal” pressure, and that bit of extra… at least for me, it was like someone plopped down on my back for a few minutes. So strange.

My doctor is awesome though… and I’ve probably said that to various people in various places over 100 times by now. 😏 But he talked to me through the whole thing, told me everything that was happening, everything that was getting ready to happen, and then when I was in the recovery room he came out and showed me the pictures, described it all over again to make me feel at ease, and that was about it. 🤗 There was a lot more “fuss” than I was expecting, but if I notice that it’s making a difference over the next few weeks I certainly won’t object to doing it again when needed. 🤨 ‘Cuz something’s gotta give… something has to eventually work better on me again, right?

The day before all of this, I stopped in again to see Mom and Dad. 👪 As I was telling him about what I was getting ready for, he mentioned the procedure that he was getting ready to have… but he said it in such a “matter of fact / no big deal” type of way that I didn’t really pause to consider the seriousness. 🤔 More serious than mine, anyway. A heart cath is one of those common-ish surgeries where you just expect that cardiac surgeons can basically do them in their sleep… but each patient can obviously be very, very different – so you can’t really say for sure how safe it is or isn’t. 👨🏻‍⚕️👍🏻

But, and I think it started way back when Mom had a brain tumor removed, for whatever reason I just have a strong faith in medicine, the people that practice it, along with the technology and science behind it. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Yeah, I’m all fucked up now, but not because of the fusion surgery… it was because of the delay of the surgery. So that’s why I wasn’t sweating my injection yesterday, and why I’m only slightly sweating Dad’s upcoming procedure. Oh, and you may have noticed that I didn’t mention God in all those things I said have faith in… but yeah, he’s absolutely watching over all of it, for all of us, so while it’s not a guarantee – it does add a subconscious sense of “unconcern” when thinking about it all.

New Year’s Eve was a big ol’ meh. I can’t even remember my exact mood that day, but I could make a pretty good guess. 😏 Luckily I saw a post on Twitter that said if you started watching “Doctor Who – The End of Time: Part II” at 10:54pm, at exactly midnight it would be at the part where The Doctor visits Cardiff and Rose spots him and wishes him a Happy New Year. It’s just a nice moment – because he’s already traveled with her extensively, and he’s actually dying now, but in this particular moment he has gone back to before they had met – so she didn’t even realize who he was yet. 😢😊 I dunno, you have to be a fan of the show I guess. 🤓 But I barely remember it working out just right, she said “Happy New Year!” right at midnight, then *ploop* I was out.

As for a potential “Doctor Visit #2” regarding the “Oh, hey, there’s something on your thyroid.” noted by the technician that ran the MRI for my spine… I’m really not sure what I’m going to do about that yet, if anything. 😐 It doesn’t help that I just watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where a couple of the characters were referring to a family member who had cancer on her thyroid without even knowing it, and died soon after it was detected. 😕 Thinking about that… I dunno, if I really start feeling some sort of effects from whatever it is then I might go see what’s up, but if it’s something bad bad already – I’m not sure I’m interested in finding that out. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Foolish? Probably… but only for someone who isn’t prepared for what “not knowing” could bring next. Meh… I’m still discussing it with friends. It’s hard to say “It’s okay, I’m kinda ready to check out anyway…” without people getting all concerned and up in your business. 😅 But anyway…

It’s still effing frigid here in Ohio. 😬 Waking up to five degrees, or one degree… with the house cracking and popping from enduring the constant sub-freezing temperatures… yeah, this shit is for the birds. 😰 Today, just a couple of miles from home, while trying to thaw their work truck – some poor folks managed to explode the building they were working in… and the sound, even from that far away, jolted me awake by shaking the house. 😨 I honestly looked outside to see if a car had skidded into the house or something, even though the house is like 80′ from the road.

Hopefully now that the holidays are over I’ll start feeling a little more normal, relatively speaking. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas and New Year’s… there’s just a lot of emotions wrapped up in the memories right now, so getting back to boring old crappy “regular” time again is comforting. ☺ I finished shaving the cat, got the living room all vacuumed and straightened up, so I’m gonna slowly build on that progress. In what fashion, I’m not quite sure yet… but just moving forward instead of being frozen here would be an improvement. 🤷🏻‍♂️

And on Twitter I’ve unfollowed any accounts related to politics and news. 🤦🏻‍♂️ I did it once before but couldn’t make it stick, because it’s in my nature to stay informed… but Donald Trump is a fucking moron, and I can’t keep clicking open that app each day to see him comparing “nuke button” sizes with Kim Jong-un and planning “Presidential Fake News Awards” and other equally insane bullshit. 🙇🏻‍♂️ People say he’s just trolling the world, that he’s pointing out errors that journalists have made… which is fine… but he’s still a fucking moron, is ridiculously unqualified to be President, and is making the United States a laughing stock and much more hated than we’ve been in a long time. 😣 And my watching it on Twitter isn’t gonna make a lick of difference one way or another… so I’m gonna try to shield myself from the stupid and stupid’s followers.